Open Letter From Amai

M.I. Jazz Freeman
Sep 7, 2018 · 6 min read
This is a letter I received in the mail, the week of my birthday, from my past self from 2 years ago. I’d sent it to my future self at a time capsule lab at an Octavia Butler exhibit.

I am queer. Words both fail and succeed at conveying meaning, including the words we choose to identify with. For me, the word means that I experience attraction to people apparently independently of their gender identity. It means that I disidentify from conceptions of manhood that people associate with my body. It means that I always experience myself separately from gender categorizations of my behavior and the way I present from day-to-day. It means I have felt more affirmed in my identity than I ever have before now that I am 6 months into ingesting testosterone-blockers twice a day and estrogen once a day. It means I feel excited at the possibility that I can exist in the world where people cannot deduce my gender assignment at birth, making them uncertain of if I am AMAB transitioning into womanhood or AFAB transitioning to manhood. Just as I experience myself apart from where others believe they have located me, I want others to be completely unsure of where I am in their conceptualizations of my gender identity.

I am black. My ancestors have endured much and could not conceive of the future they were forced to build and sacrificed to create. I live in that future and I betray complacency with the place society reserves for me and all other black folks. I know when I am seen and when I am not. I know when someone is projecting their racialized fears onto me. I know when someone is fetishizing my body and my personhood.

I am an afro-futurist. I am the past, present, and future simultaneously and at all times throughout my life. I am shaping myself into someone who exists to cast light on how obsolete today is. I am a person who calls a world without oppression home. I embody myself as I see fit. I resonate with how I wish to be and I walk towards that self-conception each opportunity I find.

I am an anarchist. I believe the most effective strategy for changing the world is by challenging ourselves to manifest our livable lives in community with each other, through networks of mutual aid that keep our movements sustainable and imaginative. I believe any orientation towards oppressed struggling folks that isn’t about having trusting capacity-building relationships as people determined to get free is one that is still anchored in oppressive paternalistic hierarchical structures — structures that will ultimately stifle any attempt to create an egalitarian world.

I confidently state these facts about myself now, because I wasn’t always able to. Much of my life I spent in isolation both from queer folks and radicals who know that we have to bury this world beneath a new world we’ve created with each other.

I’ve been told by others that I am not what queer looks like. I’ve been detained at gunpoint while reading a book in a cafe. I’ve been shamed for daring to identify as anything else but a man. I’ve been fired under the suspicion that I was a terrorist. I’ve been told that hormones would be wasted on me because I’m not a woman.

Over the years of having my behavior and presentations policed, I found myself acutely depressed with no awareness of what else I could comfortably be. I resented being a man, I was terrified of embodying masculine roles, and I felt nothing but shame wherever someone attributed masculinity to my interests. Isolated from influences that could have shown me a different way of being, I thought it was all I could do to make myself as invisible as possible. I wanted to be undesirable, not in the sense of being unpleasant or violent, but by virtue of being forgettable, unattractive, and passive. In that depression I neglected my health, convinced that perishing was the best I could do if I had to be a man — if I had to wield patriarchy in any way.

I’d withdrawn entirely from the social demands of daily life besides wage labor. I would clock out and I pour myself into tumblr, with all of my emotional vulnerabilities and fragmented trotskyist politics I inherited from a vanguardist group I quit and was not yet able to fully discard, desperate to make a connection with people who could show me how else I could be. I wanted to know what other radicals, feminists, and queer folks did in the world, and I wanted the space to develop and form my own alignment with them.

And I did make connections. I met an anarchist and their comrades who brought me parcels of zines and brought me along to a squat as well as a noise demonstration that showed me what direct action looked like. I video chatted with a person who would soon come out as agender, for the first time talking to someone else who felt like I did, shattering my previous conceptions about what queer was and was not that I’d internalized from in spaces that rejected me. I would come out to my tumblr friends that I was also agender the same summer as this friend. I later met someone in Oakland one summer who had seen how unsustainable much of the left’s organizing methods were and they wanted to dream up a new way of building. They would successfully convince me to move out of San Jose and to Oakland the winter of the same year, because it was my best chance at escaping my depression, isolation, and acute dysphoria. I’ve maintained these friendships over the years to this day, and I have so much gratitude for what they did for me, supporting my journey to where I am today. I began my long path towards treating my depression because I knew others existed in the world that inspired me — that I felt comfortable following and supporting. These were also the first people I ever introduced myself to as “Amai” and made space for me to explore ways of existing that felt like me for once.

I still struggle a bit with gender, truth be told. The way I see it, my body has a gender assignment linked to it. It is my body that people see with a gendering gaze and this is what creates my assumed gender identity. But me, who I am and how I experience myself, perhaps where I experience myself is not in my body per se. My self-perception is somewhere else observing the act of my own self as it is misgendered by a heteronormative world. I am constantly aware of my prescribed gender as it is constantly aiming for me and always missing. Still, my reference point for all of this is my body and how the world reacts to it. It is these discontinuities that have lead me to identify as trans and agender.

Its new to me having radical queer community who support me as I exist in spite of these imposed boundaries on my identity i’ve had to and continue to navigate. It is new to me that, in aligning myself with queer and feminist radicals, I have learned to receive and develop my own caregiving skills. Its new to me that I have learned what mutual aid is and what it is to maintain that within a network, having only dreamed of sustainable communal work previously in my life.

My aspirations are towards egalitarian futurity. I am dedicated to dismantling patriarchy and the many violences it inflicts on us. I am dedicated to the relational work of movement building. That is to say I aspire to make every friendship, comradeship, and relationship a space for liberatory practices rooted deep in empathy and love. I want to transform how we experience ourselves with each other so that we might discard the prescribed roles and identities capitalism can’t exist without. I want to demonstrate that agency is its own future. I want to help the desire to see a better world in our lifetimes ripple in infinite resonance across the globe.

I hope you’ll join me.

M.I. Jazz Freeman

Written by

M.I. (“Amai”) ~ Agender Jazz Aesthete ⊙ Dedicated to the development of new humanizing praxis to combat Imperialist White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy

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